Front brake pad replacement

[Citroenfan]

Replaced the front pads on the XM yesterday - what a PITA compared to a D I was under the very distinct impression that Cit got rid of the those funky 'clock work brakes' in 66 . The description of how to do those suckers sounds SO EASY in the manual.......The problem was that the passenger side (RS) piston would not retract as one turned it CW. Gave Dave Burnham a call and told me he remembered that his partner Carter having to shove really hard to get one he was working to retract. With that in mind I got a small 'C' clamp and by carefully putting more than a bit of pressure on the piston it finally went in. OTHO the driver side piston retracted as it was suppose to. Over all it took about 3 times as long to do the job (even after I figured out about using the 'C' clamp on that one recalcitrant piston) as it ever has to do the front brakes on a later model D

Steve

This post has been edited by Citroenfan on August 26, 2015 11:36 pm

[xmexclusive]

Hi Steve

Did you ease off the bleed screw a bit before trying to wind the piston back in?
Otherwise you are trying to compress LHM.

John

[Citroenfan]

Hi John,

Yes - on both sides along with two small bleed lines and a couple of cups. When the right side piston would not go in, that is when I called Dave in NY to see if he and/or Carter had experienced anything similar (as I know they have a couple of XM's they maintain). And I did get a bit of fluid (not much mind you) out of each side. OTOH it did require a fair amount of inward force to get the right side caliper piston to retract. I also noticed that the right side pads had about 1/2 the friction material left as the left side units. Now that could have been the result of long term gas contamination on that side - just a wild guess. In the intervening time since we acquired the XM we have put some 1500 to 1600 miles on the car to really try and get it sorted out. Have not had any feeling from the brakes that one side was not braking quite as hard as the other.

Will say this - have been playing around with sphere pressures and by-pass opening diameters. Am getting the car to ride quite close to what my D's do with their modified removable dampers (not at factor specs). When I am satisfied with what I have come up with (in a couple of weeks) well put the info up on the site.

The other thing I noticed is that the wear sensor connections were absent on both sides of the car. I will discuss this with Hein (he had done a bit of maintenance on this car over the years where he works -B&C Foreign- in Ventura, CA) this weekend when we are all at our West Coast Rendezvous.

Not being use to 'modern cars' I discovered that more than a few makes out there use a similar system, it seams, these days. As I mentioned I really thought Cit had gotten away from the 'clock word' emergency brake design many, many moons ago . Just makes the old adage all the more relevant - 'The more things change the more they same to stay the same'.........

Steve

This post has been edited by Citroenfan on August 27, 2015 04:03 pm

[nightmare]

Nothing stays the same "EXCEPT CHANGE".